GlassFish 3.1 Milestone 6 is out !

As part of my various Java EE 6 and GlassFish presentations, I was in Luxemburg last week visiting the YaJUG. The other speaker having declined a few weeks before the event, I ended up doing a two part presentation, the second one focused on GlassFish (slides). I think both went well but I’ll confess that I received the same feedback from three different attendees – GlassFish 3.x needs to have clustering before it is seriously considered as a strategic runtime for their company (lots of banks in Luxemburg).

I honestly didn’t think that lacking clustering in 3.0.x was such a big issue for the following reasons:

• Java EE 6 and modularization (HK2/OSGi) were more important
• people are still building Java EE 6 applications
• GlassFish 2.1.1 provides state of the art clustering today for Java EE 5 applications
• GlassFish 3.1 (which has Clustering as its main theme) will follow the 3.0.1 release by less than a year to provide a second-generation Java EE 6 product with centralized admin, load-balancing, and HA.

Now, perception is more important than my personal take on this so, here’s where GlassFish 3.1 stands :